Why do people think this is a "bad thing"? It's no different than buying an expensive home anywhere in the world, except it comes with a citizenship. I doubt he can use the favorable taxation - he would have to renounce his US citizenship for that.
For example, if mass civil unrest breaks out in the US as a result of the recent election, Eric Schmidt can flee to his estate in Cyprus and ignore the fact that he owned a social network (Youtube) that knowingly hosted radical content and disinformation which would have (in part) caused the civil unrest he’s fleeing from.
Whether or not that’s his intention, it doesn’t matter. True or not, what people are seeing is billionaires knowingly destabilizing the country in order to make a lot of money, then using that money to protect themselves against the country they just damaged.
That very thing happened earlier this year at the start of the pandemic, SV billionaires fled the country to go to a private island in New Zealand, while their employees suffered and died back here in the US: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/coronaviru...
I wouldn't blame Schmidt much for YouTube's disinformation problem. I'd blame the people directly running YouTube (especially people running it recently / now).
As an anarchist - most people love the state and love giving it power, rich people just use the power that the masses so eagerly give away.
If you want to know where the power of the SV billionaires comes from, just look in the mirror. Nothing, other than our compliance, makes them that powerful and wealthy.
Conspiracy is maybe the wrong word, but OP seems to genuinely believe that Schmidt caused the recent civil unrest through his Youtube ownership.
I then linked to an article that shows this hypothetical future situation has actually happened in the recent past, billionaires fleeing to safety while their employees suffer and die. If that’s “QAnon levels” of “conspiracy madness” then holy fuck we’re screwed because this has actually happened, and recently, as shown in the article I linked to. And the fact that it actually happened is the reason people assume that’s what he’s doing now... because the same thing actually happened earlier this year with other billionaires.
I mean, I went way out of my way to explicitly avoid comments like this and it seems like you just ignored all of that and read exactly what you wanted to read. That’s not the level of discourse I expect from HN.
In the upcoming world war, NZ will just be forgotten. It's even missing from many maps ;)
Expatriating your massive wealth to avoid paying taxes makes it feel like they’re performing a smash and grab job on the whole country. Doubly so because the people doing this would still be fantastically wealthy if they stayed and paid their taxes; they’re just doing it to be even richer still.
Plus he probably has a private jet
Yes, we're both eating a liver but we're not the same kind of person.
Oligarchs travel, just like you and me. That's not what makes them oligarchs.
And where exactly do they travel that is not accessible to you and me?
I'm pretty sure that when governments ban air travel, they also ban private jet travel.
countries like Malta and Cyprus have plenty schemes under which they attract HNWI's like him. I'm surprised about Cyprus considering Schmidt is from the US which is an odd choice since it's usually Russians and Russian companies that launder their money through Cyprus.
Malta is much more popular among expat Brits and native English speakers and also (still) has a cleaner reputation compared to Cyprus.
Both jurisdictions fill a void that opened when Switzerland agreed to hand over data on US citizens to the USA. Technically Cyprus/Malta too shares data but while the Swiss banking is a lot cleaner now than it was 20 years ago and certainly lot of things are now impossible that places like Nevada, New Mexico etc still allow.
Both Cyprus/Malta have no shortage of crooks dressed as lawyers, accountants, notaries and bankers that will help him bypass the tax-men if he wants to but I strongly doubt that is the reason simply because he has better chances doing that at home. The US is now the biggest tax-haven in the world. It sounds more personal than this.
Maybe he is planning to do business with wealthy Russians (unlikely) maybe he watched Mama-Mia and is now obsessed with the idea of falling in love on a Greek island, or maybe he wants to live in a city that is politically divided as much as his home planet. (Nicosia) /s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Islands:_Tax_Havens_a...
Not that I think there's anything wrong with this, probably half of my friends have these passports. Until recently this was the easiest way for Russians to move to the EU.
well not exactly
There's nothing that Cyprus offers that's not done better somewhere else in Europe if you have the money to spend.
Sure, there are worse places out there. But to the Eric Schmidts of the world it firmly falls in the shithole category.
If they want to leave the nation that built them, it’s America’s wealth; fat tax inbound.
These are normal mortal men.
Believing they can live some decoupled free agent life on humanities tab for their accomplishments which are banal business at the core of it, not novel science, is no different from creating a monarchy and its regents, etc
They are normal men. Not deities. This is the first era where their mess being left behind isn’t just some stone fortresses and a handful of factories. This has been accomplished at great environmental cost.
They’re just people.